The Truth About
by mandassina
Summary: Stream-of-consciousness introspection. May contain spoilers from Torchwood and related series 2005 to present. Jack's chapter: How much truth do you expect from a man who has been living a lie for so long that he has forgotten his own name? Hmm?
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** Torchwood isnt mine, but the characters seem to enjoy chatting up my muse. I think Ianto has been drinking tonight, and I was actually lucky enough to transcribe his side of the conversation before he realized I was eavesdropping and retconned me.

_The Truth about Ianto Jones_

The truth is I didnt really love Lisa.

I honestly thought I did for a while. I even said the words on more than one occasion, but whether it was really infatuation or just a randy young man content with a woman letting him get his leg over, well, your guess is as good as mine.

I liked her fine. She was a sweet girl and I think we would have been good friends even without the sex, but I never saw myself having a lifetime with her. I always thought that when I met the right girl, Id be able to envision a future with her and kids and a dog and a house.

And I always thought it _would_ be a girl.

Until I met Jack.

Its not like Jack turned me or anything, although I choose to flatter him by pretending to let him think so, and he chooses not to believe its just simple flattery. I knew since the ABBA chat with Mam that I was bisexual. I was fourteen then, and I think Mam worked it out before I did.

I just assumed I would settle down with a nice girl someday because thats what men of my background did when they matured, unless they wanted to be ridiculed and abused. Jack and his antipathy for labels shattered those assumptions. Id like to meet the chav with balls enough to call him a poof to his face, especially after seeing him get angry.

But Im getting ahead of myself, arent I?

I was actually trying to find a way to break it off with Lisa when the Daleks and the Cybermen came, and suddenly she was the only familiar thing I had to hold on to in the midst of chaos. Jack says she wasnt really Lisa any more, but I needed her to be, so I believed her when she told me she was. I committed myself to helping her, to keeping her alive until I could find someone who could cure her.

And thats how I met Jack.

Working in the archives, you pick up bits and pieces of information from all the departments, and one of my talents is putting seemingly random bits of trivia together into a coherent picture. So I knew Torchwood Three would have the facilities Id need to keep Lisa alive, and I knew Jack would be the one I had to convince to take me on. All I needed was a way to catch his attention.

Imagine my chagrin to learn that it wasnt my tight jeans, my gourmet coffee, or my Savile Row suits that got the interest of the-man-who-would-shag-anything-sentient, but a bloody pterodactyl.

And thats when things got complicated.

You see, love isnt looking into your partners eyes and seeing only yourself reflected, its standing side by side, looking out into the world together, and seeing the same vision.

I expected Jack to corral the pterodactyl, put it down, and dispose of the body. Thats what Torchwood London would have done. I didnt like the idea, but it was an opportunity to convince him to hire me, and I was willing to do anything, literally anything, to save Lisa at that point.

But Jack didnt see a nuisance stray that needed to be put down. He saw a lost and frightened creature that just needed a little compassion and a safe place to stay. I was honestly a little jealous that he didnt look at me that way because I felt like he saw a kindred soul in her.

And I knew then that we shared the same vision.

I almost kissed him that night because it was so nice to just laugh with another human being again and to feel someones arms around me. Then I remembered that I was doing it all for Lisa and I stopped myself.

There would be other times over the next several months when I wouldnt stop myself, and Id always feel like the worst kind of unfaithful, ungrateful, traitorous bastard, betraying the two people I cared most about, even though I didnt really love one of them and couldnt really love the other, yet.

Then everything with Lisa fell apart.

And Jack forgave me.

After all the terrible things that happened that night and all the horrible things I said, he forgave me. Even when I still hated him for Lisas death, which I knew logically wasnt really his fault, he forgave me.

We took things slowly at first. He was a perfect gentleman, and while he flirted openly in front of the others when nothing could come of it, he never once made a move on me in private when I might be tempted to give in. When we were alone, he always let me dictate the pace.

After we brought Suzie back, after she betrayed us, again; after we had to kill her, again, I only wanted to comfort him, to offer him a safe place where he could let go of all his grief and fear and just be with someone. After he helped John Ellis commit suicide in my car, I knew I couldnt offer him comfort. No mortal ever could.

Then Abaddon killed him, and I really thought it had _killed _him, and of course it was our fault because we opened the Rift. I was just as culpable as the others, maybe more so, because he thought I would never betray him and he trusted me to stop them. He lay there in the morgue for days, cold and gray and still, and I wanted to go to him, to hold a vigil like Gwen, but I couldnt because he had trusted me, despite my past betrayal, and I had betrayed him, again.

Then he came back.

He forgave Owen and the ladies, and me. He forgave all of us. He forgave all of us for everything, every time.

And after Abaddon, I thought I couldnt bear to lose him again, but I lost him anyway, to his Doctor, who could neither fix him nor give him the answers he needed. I dont know what he went through while he was gone, except that it was terrible.

That didnt stop me from being a right prat at first.

You see, when he returned from his adventures, I was angry and jealous, so I made him court me like a proper gentleman. Wed go out for dinner and a movie or get takeaway and lie in bed watching one of my DVDs. On a rare sunny day, we would picnic in the park, and once, partly as a lark and partly as a reward to Jack for trying so hard, I took him to an office supply store where we snogged in the furniture section until the manager came and asked us to leave.

It was fun dating and playing at being lovers, but sometimes it got in the way. Jack would work so hard at doing what he thought I wanted him to do that he would forget to say and do what _he _wanted to do. Can you imagine? Jack Harkness, of all people, would forget to follow his heart. Sometimes, it felt like everything we did was just a role-playing game with Jack striving to be the perfect boyfriend, and strange as it may sound, I had to draw him out.

So I danced with him at Gwens wedding. Looking back, I wish I could have seen the look on her face when I cut in on her dance with Jack and turned to _him_ to be my partner, but at the time, all I wanted was for him to remember that he had me.

And I coaxed him into playing naked hide-and-seek. Thats right, the naked-hide-and-seek was my idea, but I swear Jack instigated the greenhouse shenanigans that Gwen walked in on later.

In hindsight, I wish I could have just let Jack be Jack when he came back from his travels with the Doctor, but until his brother Gray showed up and tried to take everything away from him, tried to destroy what he had built, tried to destroy us, I thought I needed to know that _Jack_ loved _me_.

So, there we were, Gwen, John Hart, and I, locked in the cells with Cardiff in flames, emergency services out of service, Weevils wandering the streets, the nuclear power plant going critical, Tosh and Owen out God knows where doing God knows what to try to fix things on their own, and all I can think of is whats happening to Jack, not because we need him to save the world, but because I cant bear to think about him being hurt.

And thats how I learned that the only truth that matters is that _I_ love _him_.

FIN


	2. Jack

**Disclaimer: **Torchwood isn't mine, but Jack decided to come into the bar and chat with my muse tonight. Just between you and me, the man cant hold his liquor, and he's not a happy drunk.

**Author's Note: **Each of the stories in this series will be a stream-of-consciousness piece from the perspective of one character. They can all be read as stand-alones, but each gives some insight into the others. Any events for any Torchwood series and Doctor Who are fair game for spoilers, but I will ignore character deaths (and undeaths) or other ridiculous events like storming Thames House and shouting at an alien invader as it suits me.

Thanks to Kirri1 for beta reading.

**_The Truth About_**

_Captain Jack Harkness_

How much truth do you expect from a man who has been living a lie for so long that he has forgotten his own name? Hmm?

Ha! Even that's a lie. I remember my name. It's just been so long since I've heard it spoken that I no longer worry about accidentally answering to it.

It was a good name, strong and mellifluous, and most importantly, given to me by my parents rather than scavenged from a dead man like a gold wedding ring, a few guineas pocket money, and a good combat knife taken off a battlefield corpse.

No! I _never_ did that, but you live through as many wars as I have, and you see it happen so often you learn just how to search a corpse, how to break clutching fingers or cut them off to take anything of value they might be clinging to. As detestable as it is, I never begrudged the soldiers who would rob the dead. A soldier on the battle field doesn't take things off a fallen comrade, or even an enemy, to get rich. He does it to survive. I wasn't any better than the men who stole from corpses; I just didn't need to do it.

What's the matter? Is that more truth than you were ready to hear?

Then you might want to stop your ears before you hear this:

I have committed suicide.

More than once.

And succeeded.

Every time.

It just didn't stick.

No, I'm not talking about taking sedatives and mixing them with liquor and falling asleep only to wake up and think I was dead. I don't mean taking a whole bottle of aspirin and being lucky enough to have a friend find out and take me to the A&E in time to have my stomach pumped, either.

I'm talking about putting the barrel of my Webley in my mouth, pressing the muzzle up against my palate right behind my nose so when I pulled the trigger it blew all my brains out through the back of my head. I'm talking about stepping onto the railway ten feet in front of a speeding train.

Hey! Once I even hanged myself.

Oh, don't look at me like that. Hanged is the proper past tense form of the verb when it is done with a rope around the neck and with the intent of killing the victim. Trust me, I know.

So, yeah, I hanged myself. Now _that_ was a mistake.

I thought, as long as I was hanging there, I'd stay dead.

I was wrong.

Dying like that the first time was bad enough, but coming back, gasping and sobbing for air only to find myself swinging to and fro, the rope cutting into my skin, strangling me, over and over and over . . . I was just lucky I tied the rope to a metal beam. After a couple of weeks of swaying in the breeze, I fell when it finally cut through the rope. By then I had maggots crawling in the rope burn on my neck. It takes a few minutes for broken skin to heal, and with the rope around my neck, I kept dying before that could happen.

Yes, I want to die!

Well, someday.

Oh, don't look so shocked. You value your life, and you should, and I do, too, because it's limited. Mine isn't. I'm like the fucking Energizer bunny. I keep going and going and going. And sometimes I just get so damned tired.

Bitter? Me? Why would I be bitter? I got screwed! What do you expect?

I was eleven when my dad died and my brother was taken from us by invaders. My mum couldn't even look at me after that, let alone comfort me. So I went off to war when I was fifteen, took my best friend with me and got him killed.

Then I . . . did some things I can't tell you about, not because I'm ashamed of them, although admittedly, some of them, I am, but because, well, it could be the end of the world if I told you. The people I worked for then stole two years of my life, and that pissed me off, so I became someone I didn't like very much trying to get back what they had taken. Some days I couldn't look myself in the eye when I combed my hair in the morning.

Then the Doctor and Rose saved me. We eventually landed in the middle of a war together, and I died. Rose brought me back as this. I'm not angry with her, because I know she did it out of love, and it was the first time in a very long time anyone had really loved me.

But the Doctor. He left me behind, and . . .

Actually, I stopped being bitter about that, too, a couple of years ago, when I finally caught up with the Doctor again. He couldn't fix me. He couldn't make me die. He couldn't even answer all of my questions. But I guess I found a sort of . . . fragile peace.

You see, everyone I love dies. They always will. And I have to go on, and on.

And on.

When I meet someone, when I finally screw up the courage to _love_ someone, I do it knowing that I'm going to lose them. Either they'll grow to resent me for what I am, or they'll follow me into danger and not come back. Maybe, if I am very lucky, every few hundred years, I'll find someone who loves me enough that they're willing to grow old with me even though I can't grow old with them.

The truth is, I am still afraid to love people, but at least now that I know I'm going to lose them every time and that it can't be fixed or change, I can accept it as inevitable; and knowing that I will _always _survive it, that I _must_ always survive it, it isn't quite so scary. Now, when I look at the people I love, I can see people instead of gravestones, and I can love them enough to almost mask that fear of losing them.

Maybe someday, Ill even be able to have a family again.

Right now, my team is my family.

Owen is still the same angry, frightened kid he was when his dad died and left him with that bitch of a mother who kicked him out at sixteen. Losing Katie to an alien parasite and Diane to the Rift didn't help, but . . . he's bigger on the inside, and his outward behaviour is growing to match. Saving the world on a regular basis suits him. So, I think, does Tosh.

Toshiko, she's amazing. She's innocent and an evil computer genius, brilliant and ingenuous, sweet and lethal, all rolled into one. Now that Owen has worked out that she's more than just a computer geek, he wants to find out just what she is, and she's scary enough that he treats her with respect. I didn't even have to talk to him about what I would do if he hurt her. He came to me when they started dating.

Gwen, yeah, she's a real pain in the arse, but give her a little credit. She isn't stupid, just nave. She's never been badly hurt, never had anyone close to her die, never had to kill anyone or anything yet. Rhys came back when they opened the Rift, I know she didn't fire on Lisa because I was standing right next to her, and Ed Morgan threw himself on the knife in her hand. So far, she's been lucky. She's never suffered the kind of loss or had to make the kind of horrible choices that have made the rest of us cynical pragmatists. She's still unsophisticated and optimistic and thinks genuine concern and compassion are enough to solve any problem. I don't begrudge her that. It's part of the reason I hired her in the first place. Her rose-tinted perspective makes the rest of us a little more humane, if only because we don't want to listen to her whinge. I just wish she'd get a bloody clue sometimes.

And then there's Ianto.

He's the one who scares me.

Every time he has a close call, I go a little bit crazy. I'll get angry and bossy and make everyone miserable. Then he'll put me in my place and I'll go into my office and sulk.

And after the others have gone home, he'll take me down to my bunker and shag me to within an inch of my life.

It isn't lovemaking. Not when I've come close to losing him. It's sweating and groaning and grunting and thrusting and sucking and slurping and pounding into one another and marking each other with our teeth and our nails and tasting spit and sweat and come and sometimes blood and filling each other, over and over until we're just too sore to do it again. It's him, reminding me that he's still warm and alive and here until I can finally cry myself to sleep against his chest.

And sometimes, when the covers slide off in the night and I get cold, I still have nightmares that I'm waking up next to his corpse.

And he wakes me gently, and then . . .

_Then_ we make love.

And the truth is, I don't want to die anymore.

Not as long as I can have that.

FIN


End file.
